Title text: Everyone's caught by surprise when a theory of quantum gravity is developed by a sound technician wearing patent leather shoes while editing Clerks II.

Explanation

This comic is a reference to Albert Einstein who got his first big idea while he was working as a Swiss Patent Clerk. Wikipedia has the details: "Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time."

Hence the pressure on future Swiss Patent Clerks to also come up with genius ideas while they are working there.

Clerks II is a reference to the second movie in the Clerks series by Kevin Smith, widely regarded as not nearly as good as the first - which could be said about most sequels, but you get the point.

Discussion

I think the alt-text is a play on words, where you have someone wearing "patent" shoes working on the movie "clerks II". So "patent" "clerk" if you will. Which is why everyone is surprised because they were looking for "patent clerks" with brilliant ideas, not someone wearing "patent" shoes working on a movie called "clerks..." It also seems to be sort of a jab at the absurdity of assuming there is something special about a "patent clerk". Like is it the job that is important? Just the name?

128.95.214.3 23:51, 20 September 2012 (UTC)Someone who should be working. (TJ)

I had just started work on the idea that small adjacent (geographically and chronologically) earthquakes not only signal the demise of tropical storms (as I had posited a long time ago) but that (as more recently noted) medium sized earthquakes signal their advent when I was attracted to the ancient ideas leading to the discovery of steel which was concurrent to my watching videos on Thorium Reactors which indirectly led me to the idea that fusion can take place (I had assumed fusion most unlikely) only under the auspices of the three phases in a Deep Hot Biosphere (only of course there is no need for the bio) when I was diverted by the idea of reworking The Tempest. Maybe I should get a job? I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 19:48, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

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